The Quality of Your Words
If you’re thinking of being a writer, I’ve got good news for you: Now is the best time in history to do it. You can write quickly, cheaply and make massive profits. I recommend sitting for several hours a day and pumping out as many words as you can in as little time as you can.
Literally write like someone is holding a gun to your head with a deadline and a word count.
The natural pirates among you will raise the black flag and get writing immediately. (You’re probably already writing a lot if you’re here, let’s face it.
The dubious among you though will be plagued with a terrible question.
“What If My Writing Isn’t Good Enough?”
I’m not your mother, so I can’t cuddle you and say, “You’re a special snowflake and your writing is perfect.”
Luckily, I don’t need to… really, your writing doesn’t have to be the best the world has ever seen for you to succeed.
Read on to find out more, soon-to-be-pirate writers.
Storytelling Is Not Good Writing, Nor Is It Difficult
Now, let me tell you something you can probably guess: I’m not Mr. Charisma. (I know – total shock.) In real life, I’m introverted and stories don’t come to me naturally (because hey… I sit in front of a computer most of the day typing. It’s hardly James Bond stuff.)
When I think of a natural storyteller, I don’t think of someone like me. I think of a few other guys; I’ve got a cousin who can talk for hours to anyone about anything. A few friends of mine have incredibly interesting stories of exotic lands, dalliances with dangerous girls and all manner of interesting exploits. Put me in among a group of people, and generally, it’s those guys that steal the limelight while I listen.
Those people are naturally storytellers – they can hook you on a really mundane story through force of their charisma and keep you hooked because they’re just damned interesting.
Something that they all have in common… they couldn’t be writers, despite their interestingness. For one thing, most of them couldn’t sit still for long enough to finish a single page of writing. English teachers across the planet would deride all of them for their stupid turns of phrase, bad grammar and lack of understanding of “literary norms.”
Assuming you could get them to sit still though, they’d make some great stories, despite being bad writers. That’s because your ability to write and your ability to tell a story aren’t the same thing.
You can be a fantastic writer and not a good storyteller. Look at people who write textbooks for a living. Perfect grammar and clear descriptions everywhere, but they’re still dense and boring.
Meanwhile, writers like E.L. James churn out poorly-written, literal fan-fiction that makes a billion dollars.
Critics Think Your Favourite Writer Is Terrible
Most boys and young men are attracted to action-adventure stories. As an aside, anyone who tells you, “You should write books for women because men don’t buy” are wrong. Action-adventure is massive amongst men. Horror is one of the biggest selling genres. Crime reaches a mixed audience.
Look at some of the biggest selling writers: James Patterson, Stephen King, Dean Koontz. They’re bigger among men than women.
Anyway… back to the point.
Look at those authors. Then go on Google and see about the critics’ reception of their books. It’s almost universally terrible.
Then go and look at top selling romance authors… they tend to be female and experience exactly the same thing.
Critics think that your favourite authors’ books are terrible.
Even for the aesthetes among you who only read high literature, bear this in mind:
- Charles Dickens was considered uncouth at the time of publishing most of his books.
- Alexandre Dumas was considered a mere pulp writer for his adventure classics
- Shakespeare was derided for writing plays for poor folk
The list goes on forever, but here’s the short of it: critics have terrible taste in fiction. If you look at the massive commercial successes in literature, you’ll find a ton of critics who’d tell you their success simply isn’t possible.
Again… Stephen King was derided as a hack for decades. Twilight, Fifty Shades Of Grey and The Hunger Games are all critically-panned series that are basically fan fiction. (I don’t know about The Hunger Games, but the other two series were literally conceived as fan fiction.)
My point is… you’re going to be considered a terrible writer by someone no matter how successful you are.
The Flip Side… Be Ambitious
In the last section, I talked about how great and successful writers are lambasted by critics.
Critics are people you can basically ignore as an author. A lot of critics don’t actually read all that many books. It seems crazy, but it’s similar to armchair experts in all their forms. Most guys who break down tactics for their favourite sports teams don’t actually compete either.
So, with that in mind, feel free to look at the competition’s writing technique.
I was shocked to a read a really famous author recently. These books have had movie deals and the whole yard. The kicker is that they’re not very good. In terms of storytelling, they’re great. But the writing is actually pretty sloppy. The dialogue was hard to follow. There were chapters which consisted almost entirely of scene setting and the guy did a whole lot of telling as opposed to showing.
It doesn’t matter.
Go to Amazon’s top selling list for your favourite genre. Pick a couple of those books. Read a few.
In most cases, you’re not going to be met with James Joyce levels of linguistic ability. You’re going to get a passable vocabulary and an early hook that’ll carry you through the book.
Sometimes, you’ll find complete clangers of books in the top-selling list on Amazon. This is great because of two things:
- You can do better, assuming you’ve got a reasonable command of the language
- If it’s in the top-selling list for your genre, it’s probably selling thousands of copies a day.
If you have a passable level of English, then there’s no reason you can’t do the same.
Final Thoughts: The Doorway Is Open
Once upon a time, you’d need access to a great agent, a big publisher and between the aforementioned parties, there’d need to be massive distribution networks to ensure a book sold out its print run. Then you’d need the ear of all of those people to keep the book in print.
In short, if you had connections and a bankroll, then being a writer was fine but risky in the past.
Now it’s totally different. You can be a no-name, self-published author and get massive exposure.
It’s literally as easy as typing words into your word processor, finishing the book and uploading it. If you want to have massive success, then you can collect your readers’ emails and whatnot, but you don’t have to.
I haven’t even talked about the traditional publishing route versus the indie route because it’s a no-brainer to me. You can write a book this weekend and have it for sale on Monday. With traditional publishing, it’ll take you three years. Oh, and you’ll have to give away 90% of your profits.
You can sell to anywhere on the globe and get your books in every book store that matters as a self-published author today. So can you write on any topic and thus write while adapting to the market. You can do all of this without a budget.
And you don’t have to be gifted writers to make any of this happen.